No scientific evidence, verified or unverified, can be allowed to take precedence over the existence of life after death. That is my dogma, my fixed assumption, and I have an absolute and desperate stake in that belief. If I stop believing in life after death, I shall find myself in a lunatic asylum very soon. I will not debate life after death, and I will not look at evidence against life after death. I believe in theistic evolution because it provides the promise of an afterlife.

If you're already going to deny all logic and reason, then why bother going for the Christian afterlife? It's not like it's got any more of a "promise" than making up your own about cotton candy and lollipops. Doing it because it's popular is just weak.

Why don't you go work for Alcor or the Methuselah Institute then? They're looking for the antidote of aging via an extensive array of scientific experiments. And if their solutions work out in the next century only, well, there's always cryonics.

Not fundie. This is not my opinion, but its honest, self-actualized and does not make any claim about reality.

For emotional, a belief in the afterlife is an operational assumption...an axiom that is necessary for life to make sense. For a scientist, the operational assumption is that the world is real and that we can learn about it by experiencing it. This is nothing that can be proven or substantiated empirically because it is a necessary assumption for empiricism. Neither claim is logically more valid than the other.